By Chris Banks

Is it live or is it Memorex? This was a popular slogan for cassette recording tapes in the 1980s that Boomers and Gen X’ers will remember, but maybe not the generation of Millennial poets which this next essay is really about–the young poets forged in an age of Instagram celebrity “baddies” and Youtube cat videos.

It is an exciting time in Canadian and American poetry, lots of new poets, lots of new voices, but try to get someone to say what makes for a good poem, and many just stare at their shoes. 

I asked, “What is authentic in poetry?” on social media, and got replies running the gamut of gentle mocking to language mumbling. 

Why is it so hard to nail down, to use an overworked metaphor, what makes a good poem? I suppose, for one, what is considered particularly good or vital or inspired changes over time. Some poetry, like wallpaper, doesn’t age well. Theodore Roethke once said the task of an artist is “to enter the mind of his contemporaries’ ‘ but I would add to that the artist needs to avoid the Xeroxed sheen of contemporariness. Can this be done?

The contemporary poem right now is unconcerned with syllabics, or meter, or enjambment. It cares little for poetic influence, whether something is Audenesque, or smacks of an older Canadian poet, for it seems bent on convention-slippage, emotion as the source of lyric power, its own subjective experience as default home, but perhaps most of all, unpredictability to escape the familiar and to court the fantastical.

This is a generalization, for sure, but suspicions have grown up among younger poets around traditions and practices, and I think Dean Young is correct when he advocates for a “poetry of recklessness…moving through the calculations of the rational toward irrational detonation.” (12) Perhaps this is indeed the spirit of the age. Where previous generations of poets stood against the absurd, this new one embraces it as a source of power or conflict. 

And why not? When my own generation could not make up our minds about the worth of prose poetry, say, or fought ridiculous narrative versus formal style wars, new poets are moving beyond such trench warfare navel-gazing. Gone are the ‘good ole, bad ole days’ when you could write eloquently about picking black-berries.

In a world of rapid-fire news feeds, perhaps we need a poetry of hair-trigger associations, less concerned with the rightness of a metaphor, and more messily embodying the way we think in an age of smartphones.

Yet the question persists: “What is authentic in poetry?” I kind of miss the angle-boy, “gun-slinger” poetry critics because at least they argued furiously about such things. 

I wonder if it is a fear of criticism that makes younger poets gravitate towards not obfuscation, a poor word choice, but to the point where there is a loss of control and the poem spins out into strange territories. Larry Levis once said in an interview in the Antioch Review, “a lot of young poets don’t want to be understood because they feel when they’re understood they’re dead. That only comes from the fear of criticism – the vast inhibition they get from reading critics who, because they can understand something, simply decide not to deal with it”.

I hope Levis is wrong as this seems a rather cynical view, but it is something to consider when reviewers talk in platitudes instead of engaging with what a book of poems is attempting to do.

So far, I haven’t answered my own question about authenticity in poetry so I will attempt to put down some thoughts and ideas on the subject here:

1)    First of all, I agree with James Geary “that biological experience forms the basis of metaphorical thinking” (88) and “metaphor grounds even the most abstract ideas in the physiological facts of our bodies”(96).  As much as we sometimes wish, we cannot escape our bodies and minds. Try to escape the first person singular. Good luck to you. Donald Hall has reasoned, “a poem is human inside talking to human inside. It may also be a reasonable person talking to a reasonable person, but if it is not inside talking to inside, it is not a poem”(142). Hello, hello, anybody home?

2)    Whether you call it intensity of experience or anxiety of being or a conflict of disparate things, subjectivity versus objectivity, past versus present, the inside locked into battle with the outside, no poem is going to exist without it. You cannot wallpaper a room if there is no room.

3)    Hayden Carruth has suggested “The metaphor must arise naturally from the things of the poem”(225).  You cannot shoe-horn surprise into a poem, nor meaning. They come on their own or not.

4)    A poem must enhance our lives in some way – spiritually, intellectually or emotionally – if it is indeed poetry. Call me romantic, or old-fashioned, but I cannot get past this sentiment and I hope I never will.

These are the ideas I keep on the top shelf when I am attempting to write meaningful poems. I think they are immune to the whims of poetic fashion. When I asked people what is authentic in poetry, I guess I wanted people to get passionate. To yell, “The best poems are like magic! Spell-casting! They change us. Or haunt us. If only we were so lucky!” 

Dave Smith has said, “the poem of “the real thing” will have to embrace the moving targets any man or woman is in time”(251). Perhaps we are all too busy or too distracted to consider such things, but then someone shares a poem on twitter, or you read the titular poem from a debut collection, and you find yourself transported. That, above all, is authentic.  

Works Cited

Carruth, Hayden. Selected Essays and Reviews. Copper Canyon Press, 1996.

Geary, James. I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. HarperCollins, 2012.

Hall, Donald. Claims for Poetry. Edited by Donald Hall, University of Michigan Press, 1982.

Levis, Larry, and Leslie Kelen. After The Obsession With Some Beloved Figure: An Interview With Larry Levis. Summer 90 ed., vol. 48, Antioch Review. 3 vols.

Roethke, Theodore. On poetry and craft: selected prose of Theodore Roethke. Copper Canyon Press, 2001.

Smith, Dave. Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry. LSU Press, 2006.

Young, Dean. The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction. Graywolf Press, 2010.